How to Optimize Inkscape with Zoom and View

If you've worked with advanced drawing in Inkscape before, you may have noticed that Inkscape starts to seriously slow down. In this quick tip, we'll go over a few ways to get your document back up to speed.

1. Adjust Some Preferences

Step 1

Good old File > Inkscape Preferences has some options to free up some processing. Select the Filters menu to open up an array of quality options for both blurs and filters. Go ahead and select what works best for your setup. This will dramatically increase your Inkscape's speed.

If you're feeling ambitious, you can even increase the number of threads (processors) to do some more of the rendering. I personally didn't notice a difference with different numbers of threads, but it might be worth a shot.

Step 2

On the left, I have the Blur set to "Best quality" and the right is set to "Lowest quality"... obviously. As you can guess, the lowest quality will give you a big speed boost while the best quality will bog you down.

Of course, these settings are for visual purposes only - your document will publish with the best quality no matter what.

2. Toggle Display Mode

Step 1

Below, we've got a couple layers of apples with some added shadows and blurs. I've already noticed Inkscape is starting to get a little slow, but I really don't want to turn down the quality of these effects.

A neat alternative to speeding Inkscape temporarily (or as you need it) is to simply hit Control + 5 to toggle the display mode. Or, you can always head up to View > Display Mode. Let's see what these look like.

Step 2

I've toggled to Display Mode: No Filters which immediately sped up Inkscape enough for me to quickly edit something without it being annoyingly slow. As you can see below, the blurs are totally gone and my shadows are just little blobs now.

Step 3

Rarely, setting Display Mode: Outline might become useful to you. It turns every path or object into a simple wire-frame situation. And of course, you can Control-5 to toggle back to your normal display mode.

3. Managing Your Zoom

Step 1

Your view is based on what you're zoomed in on, right? Let's go over a few tricks for zooming in and out of your document. Get familiar with these icons under View > Zoom. These buttons allow you to zoom in specifically on selections, drawings, page size, or page width.

Step 2

You can also find those useful zoom options by clicking the Zoom tool. The neat part about using the actual tool is that you can drag a box of what you'd like to fill your screen with, as you can see below.

Step 3

Another neat little shortcut for zooming in and out is to simply hit the + or - buttons on your keyboard. One of my personal favorites is to hold Control and use your scroll wheel for zooming.

Let's end on a fun fact: Inkscape's zoom range is 1% - 25600%.

That's All!

We went over a lot of good options for optimizing your Inkscape's performance along with a few tricks for keeping your drawing properly zoomed. Hopefully this was a quick guide to keep your Inkscape designing as fast and efficient as possible. Thanks for reading!

Aaron Nieze is a Graphic Designer from Chicago, Illinois. He started in the field of web design and programming, but the design soon became the main act. He is now a graphic designer at Shmoggo.com working mostly with vector based company design projects. Aaron started writing with Vectortuts+ in 2013 with a focus on the free vector software, Inkscape.